The Taste of Ash
by Neko Kuroban
Summary: Mourning is well and good, but Yuffie Kisaragi will remember her father her own way.


**Originally written for a "quick write" prompt on LiveJournal. Set several years post-game, this disregards any new canon beyond the original game. **

**The Taste of Ash**

They wrap her

(_like the diseased, like the dead_)

in immaculate ivory silks. Proper mourning is always winter-white.

She thinks that her father would hate this, hate the foreign devils with their foreign black mourning and their foreign priests with foreign rites and foreign **G**od. She stands and looks pretty like all the princesses in fairy tales would, her chin pointed at just the right angle, imagining that she looks her

(_dead_)

mother. People keep asking if she is all right, if she will be "okay" (_whatever that means_, she thinks uncharitably), and she merely nods, because she cannot say what she wants to say which is _why wouldn't I be_ with the end bitten off in a challenge rather than a query.

She decides that she hates the whole ordeal. She hates the women who continually press starched linen squares (for tears she will never shed) into her palm. She hates the men who either bow or squeeze her fingers in their sweaty, fleshy white hands. She hates her father for never giving a damn about her or her mother, for being as unrelenting as the mountains, for being dead and displayed in a stupid carved box so she cannot rage against him.

She is expected, as custom dictates, to spend the night of the cremation and the following day at a mountain shrine secluded in prayer – and, yeah, she hates that, too. The incense is cloying, but she is convinced that she can still smell the smoke from the pyre floating up from the winding city streets below.

The bottle of liquor is for her to pour her libations to the gods and to the dead. Instead, she toasts herself aloud for having lived this long, for being "fucking awesome", raising the bottle into salute. She pledges to 'start being excellent to people' and stop neglecting her garden and her cats and to learn Costan and maybe figure out how to knit.

She takes savage, angry mouthfuls of it, and it is not at all like the rice wine or the ale she is familiar with. The liquor tastes like nothing and burns her throat and the world is sharper and clearer and, after awhile, the corners are less sharp.

Sitting on the dirt floor of the grotto, cradling her bottle in slack fingers, she gropes for theses on why her father was a miserable bastard. She aims for a hundred, but the sky starts turning pink and gold around thirty-nine and why had she never noticed how pretty it was? Surely that was why she was crying now – not ladylike sniffles, but a stupid teenage girl's ugly hiccupping sobs. She struggles for a few more reasons, but, by forty-two, she is sick, and, by forty-three, she is asleep.

Sleeping is prohibited by tradition, she is sure, but she does not wake until the sun is high in the sky. It is too bright to see by; she clenches her eyes shut against the light and the pounding headache that threatens to consume her until the shadows grow long and the pain ebbs. Just as she thinks she might have mastered drinking, a wave of nausea strikes. She has not eaten, and she is retching, coughing, spitting helplessly in the sickly blue-green scrubs.

The sun glints off of a handwritten label of a bottle, exactly like the one she had finished, save for that this one has her mother's name and title and dates of birth and death. It is for libations, of course, but it has never been touched.

The knowledge that her father never made sacrifices for her mother strikes her and she wishes suddenly that she could be sick for real. She tries to think of a time when he had shown fait in anything. He had always observed custom to the letter, but he had never once shown any kind of belief in anything, save for…

("_Shinjiteru._")

her.

She will later describe it as something possessing her, but the desire to purify herself makes perfect sense at the time. She tears off the cumbersome layers of colorless fabric until she stands naked beneath the afternoon sky, arms splayed. She holds herself still like that until she can feel the unforgiving sun burning her shoulders, her arms, her breasts.

She bathes herself in the river.

Summer rain has stirred the muck at the bottom, so that a cloud of silt rises with each step she took until she was waist-deep. The current is not strong here; this stream is but an off-shoot of the river proper. Centuries ago, this grotto had been carved out of the mountainside to allow seclusion and to hide the glow of four hundred candles -- they've been placed everywhere: in the ground, in trees, in the hewn stone walls -- from the city below.

The water is icy-cold against her skin, which fails to make sense. In the heat of summer, oughtn't it be at least tolerable? She submerges herself at one point, staring at the play of the light on the surface as she counts off breaths, but the water is too shallow to remain suspended in the childish game.

(She longs for her days of aimless wandering, of highlands and jungles and motion sickness and calluses on her palms and, damn it all, _freedom_.)

Time seems to turn in upon itself as she suns dry on a broad, flat rock. The sun setting in the west is a signal, as it always is. As she watches, a light appears in the watchtower on the furthest mountain, and when each of the towers in the outlying summits are lit, one at a time, the act contains the same magic it used to.

She locates the bottle of her mother's libations. Unable to dislocate the stopper, she smashes the neck against the rock until it shatters. Alcohol spills out, carrying its earthy scent. She pours a drink for her religion's high god with a dramatic flick of her right hand, using her left to draw a clumsy gods' circle on her forehead. She realizes -- not without a start -- that she has nearly forgotten how to do it.

A good of the liquor remains. With it, she scrawls the kanji for her own name on the ground, sloppy characters that are each nearly a foot high.

She drops the bottle when torchlight appears at the base of the mountain. Had so much time already passed? She dresses quickly, tying her _obi _in the simplest of knots, the only she had ever really mastered, then, for a final bit of

(_blasphemy_)

ceremony, strikes a match.

Her name goes up in flames.

When she meets her entourage more than halfway down the path, Sadako -- one of her handmaids -- regards her with concern. "Are you okay, my lady?" Her wide eyes are full of worry. According to tradition, the spirit of a proper ruler was supposed to enter the heir chosen to keep the vigil. "Do you feel any different?"

_Not at all_. "Yeah."

Sadako looks mollified, though even her thin layer of white greasepaint cannot mask her doubts. Yuffie supposes she fails when it comes to being able to cut a particularly striking figure: barely coming to the other woman's chin, with damp hair and her wooden sandals dangling from one hand.

"Did you get some closure?"

"Pfft. N_o_."

This mourning thing?

Whatever.

She'd do it her own way.


End file.
